diamond knife embedded
in a cryoultramictrotome
(bibliophile’s imaginative invention)
reasons away the horrors of imprisonment
nature of electrons allowing
an intimate picture of nature
in the half-light of her admiration

‘I have borne this poor starling
as a crest to my arms’

husk and kernel unite
unsaying every word
in indented continuations
cave paintings and charcoal outlines
of her same lamentation
all artifacts of the passion:
Kierkegaard’s desire to discover something
that thought itself cannot think

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53 Comments:

soren can def challenge the thought…and even our best thoughts fall short…mind boggling verse anna…i like the textures toward the end…the husk, cave paintings and charcoal…she demilitarizes the language….liquid modernity, ha i like that turn of phrase….lots of refs here and spent some time looking up a few to catch the gist…intriguing verse…

Yes, he was describing the ultimate paradox. Liquid Modernity is a book by Zygmunt Bauman that takes a sociological overview of the state of globalization and the increasing fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness to call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience. He contrasts it with the hard modernity of the past. Thanks so much for exploring the allusions and references; I always appreciate your feedback.

I continue to struggle in experimental pieces with the amount of density or richness I can get away with. I was in a wild mood when I wrote this and may at a later, tamer time rewrite it :). How wonderful you read three of my pieces today. I felt positively spoiled, thank you!

Yes, sometimes it is necessary to reevaluate your art, its sources and experiments to make a next step. To come to terms with the ultimate paradox and act as if. Thank you Kim for this thought provoking comment.

Love this. Very cool adventure in philosophy and psychological states, backed with outstanding use of symbols and imagery. This most certainly has the feel of one of those rare poems one comes across, where the reader just knows, they could come back to this one and each time unwrapping another nugget of revelation. Fantastic all around.

i can see these birds in cages, individual people, whole communities, countries, shared commitments to human rights, species in shrinking cages of habitat, ultimately our planet is caged in broken assumptions about ownership and extraction.

i feel frustrated by a dea(r)th of useful ‘authoritative’ broadcast and the cacophony of navel lint and trivial furies that obfuscate collective human reasoning in shared media.

my lint: this week they sprayed herbicide on my park and i watch the arabesque charm of the willie wagtail dancing over the grasses looking for insects and hope the rain has made them safe to eat. we can grow grevilleas for honey eaters and have seed for parrots but it is hard to look out for the insect eating birds and lizards.

australia’s cages seem to press close, they aim to mine around the barrier reef. our thirsty country has 1000 new rice/cotton farms demanding more water from dying river systems. our politicians deny truth and play chicken with war. complicit in war crimes and torture.

it is also spring and beautiful. kids on bikes, snuffly dogs and especially trees. hope is a precious doubt. thankyou as always for a resoundingly resonant and mind expanding journey Anna.

You explicate so many important issues here and I agree with your concerns. ‘Hope is a precious doubt.’ your poetic mind in full bloom here. Spring arrives in all its glory. Thank you for plumbing some of its depths and themes. A metaphor that works for the individual and community, that mirrors ecology and experimental art/creative acts. Compassion seems at its weakest among the complicit.

I like many of the lines in this poem because it’s how I’ve been feeling, though I think not quite the same. Exploration, attempting to express something difficult. Wanting to get out, get air. Things seem to go one way and then another. Trapped in the mess. I read it earlier and then again just. It’s such a multi-dimensional poem. Difficult but intriguing to explore.

That exploration feels vital to me, to be in and of the world, to express in a new form. Yet we do get trapped in mental sets, routine, and as you say ‘the mess’ (absolutely!). I did intend it to be read many ways, to encapsulate many processes and ideas, to be potentially psychologically and/or globally oriented depending on the reading/reader. By building a foundation with a character from a novel, Maria, and Austen’s allusion to her character (Sterne’s starling) I think opened more possibilities in this postmodern experiment. Thank you very much for the reread and your interesting and important insights.

found myself immersed into the spirit of eloquence of leaning towards ancient and perenial thought of these great minds of the at once eternal and the perpetual with the simplicity/immensity of the starling – and am blown away Anna – another great one – Lib

You are forever expanding my vocabulary and knowledge base, Anna, weaving thought-provoking images. I admire your ability to tap into the ancient and the contemporary, merging the two. You, my friend, are an explorer in the world of word and thought.

I jokingly said to one reader last week I am reintroducing the English language one poem at a time :). Thank you Victoria, there’s a quote I love that says that you cannot discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. I try to keep it in mind when I sail away.

Meaning and narrative are not always primary concerns (or available) in postmodern poetry, though I am sorry to hear that you are frustrated. Here the primary source of Maria in Mansfield Park helps indicate a direction but the poem does take imaginative and cognitive leaps from there. Very nice to meet you. I do not always write experimental poetry so perhaps on another visit you will find something more to your tastes.

Hey Anna – I must confess that some of this is just too complex for me. I know that it is very well constructed, but it is really quite tightly squeezed, and I am not philosphically educated enough to catch it. But from the phrase of the starling on, I do a better job, and this part I found very beautiful. k.

It’s all really interesting. For me, the blogging context is difficult as I am reading a lot and I also feel that I am (due to all kinds of other factors) losing my brain a bit these days – so I have a hard time following anything very complex (other ahem than my work!) You use quite arcane vocabulary and references very freely, and make rather sophisticated jumps. This is admirable, and one senses your drft and that it is actually extremely specific, but it is at a more intellectual level than I, at least, can take in in one go (and in that context.) I am being very honest now, but you may consider making the poems a bit shorter, given the nature of the your audience (including me). Because I think you have a lot included in each stanza, but it becomes hard to parse through a longer poem with this kind of intense and very intellectual compression. I think you sort of cheat yourself here, as you dont’ give each bit its due,and allow some shorter poems to stand on their own. This is just my thought – and honestly = if I were more intellectual, I would probably not have this issue. k.

These are helpful suggestions. I will give them careful consideration. I hope you will consider joining in Meeting the Bar tomorrow as it’s my first time hosting :). I think you will enjoy the subject.

Abstract. Unlike Brian, I could not follow that allusions — I wish there were links at the bottom for a few of them. Though I have found that poetry bloggers rarely read links — I would. And it would help share so much of the poem.

So, as I said, Abstract. And I usually skip reading abstract poems with allusions that make it impenetrable – yet your writing (and the science, I must admit) drew me in and I read the damn thing three times — and even the comments — hoping for hints. I’ve only heard of Derrida, for example and know some of post-structuralism.

The science and line about soren were big catchers for me.
“desire to discover something that thought itself can not think”.

Robert Anton Wilson

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

Witold Gombrowicz

“Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog.” Ferdydurke

I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.

Gustav Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Dušan “Charles” Simić

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Monique Wittig

"Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it... Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being - subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say 'I' I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor. "

W.S. Merwin

All the things that really matter to us are impossible...Writing poetry is impossible. I don't know how to write a poem. A poem - there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don't know. There is so much that comes out of what we don't know and what we don't have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. - from Doing the Impossible, Yes Magazine, Issue 59

Thomas Aquinas

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.